Data-driven democracy: Lukasz Krol talks to Stefan Turkheimer

Key points by Ioanna Georgia Eskiadi

In today’s webinar we talked about data and their role in democracy and how can be used so as to influence the audience.

• Data and democracy are strong related.
• Online advertising ethics.
• Cambridge Analytica, the truth behind.
• Role of money on political campaigns.
• Political microtargeting one of the most effective tools on Facebook.
• Elections 2016: use of data for microtargeting to match people and attract voters.
• Use of data from voters for political microtargeting on Facebook.
• Geo-targeting effective tool to serve the ads.
• On Google politicians spend lower amount of money than Facebook.
• Facebook is a big political operation.
• If you focus on idea people will come in but if you don’t do this people will not come.

Stefan Turkheimer is the Deputy Political Director in the Elizabeth Warren Campaign and his work is related with issues such as microtargeting, political advertising and the relationship between politicians and the media. Ethics are really important on online advertising since there are a lot of dangers and cases of deception of citizens. Political microtargeting, is one of the biggest changes since 2008 Obama’s elections. If you have Facebook data you can match people and progress to the next level of micro-targeting. Since 2016 has been done a lot of work on matching people and delivering more targeting messages. “On 2008, we had the vote list and we could correlate between people we have offline and match them with people online”, says Turkheimer. Each politician can take a different type of ads targeting in Twitter or Facebook, especially the geo-targeting. Geo-targeting is important to elections, since you can upload a list of 15 people and serve the ad to them.

Cambridge Analytica is a case where they cheated, they violated terms of Facebook. They took voters identity because they weren’t concerned about privacy issues and they see the connections of people so as to expand the level of targeting by using these trusted relations. Cambridge Analytica targeted people and went deep down to Facebook profiles to find what information were useful for them. They marked people thought that were more interested on conspiracy theories. They had so much data and information, in a so much cheaper way.

Political candidates had spent a lot of money on Facebook advertising from May 2018 was more than 1,3 billion dollars. On google politicians are spending lower amounts of money and this happens because of the cookies, and also because of the difficulty of advertising on Google. Facebook ideally matches profiles and makes easier for politicians to reach areas of influence much easier and it’s cheaper than Google. Facebook has been a big political operation, it’s a way of political parties to be advertised. Political conversations help people engage with candidates.

This event is part of Digital Communication Network Southeast Europe hub’s Ideas in Action — Digital Engagement, a series of virtual events launched in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. The series aims to engage digital communities globally, to promote accurate information, combat distortions, encourage responsible behavior, and discourage panic, support mitigation of a global pandemic, and avoid major societal disruptions.

DCN SOUTHEAST EUROPE HUB is a consortium of Aristotle University, Digital Communication Network, non-profits, public and private organizations and companies involved in the fields of digital communication, social impact campaigns, technology, and innovation. It is a unique, interdisciplinary coalition tapping into the best talent and resources across Europe.